I am not American nor Swiss but have lived for multiple years in both countries and can echo your sentiment.
> The poster mentions the low rate of federal tax on the average wage. This is only part of the story.
In my experience, when considering EVERYTHING (e.g. remaining net monthly salary) the overall tax rate in the US (California) and Switzerland ended up being similar and around 30%. However, in the surrounding countries from the Eurozone, tax rates for similar income brackets tend to be significantly higher.
To be honest, I did like living in Switzerland, but my feeling is that a lot of the benefits they enjoy arise from arbitrage situations with neighboring countries. Taking your example from shopping at Marktkauf [1] (right across the German border in Basel), people living in Switzerland massively go there for multiple reasons:
1) prices are generally much cheaper, and on top of it
2) being from outside the EU you can get the 18% tax rate back, so essentially you can shop tax free and bring it over the border for no fees up to 300 chf/day.
Similarly, there's a tonne of P.O. box services in the same town allowing you to buy stuff from EU Amazon sites at lower prices and ship it to the P.O. box address in Germany, pick it up and take it over the border.
In general, probably Switzerland has opened up in the last few years, but it still feels like a very traditional (even old-fashioned) country deeply rooted in its own ways of doing things, in spite of a very large foreign population, e.g. around 23% of its population (from [2] and [3]) are foreign residents, who live there but have NO right to vote.
> The poster mentions the low rate of federal tax on the average wage. This is only part of the story.
In my experience, when considering EVERYTHING (e.g. remaining net monthly salary) the overall tax rate in the US (California) and Switzerland ended up being similar and around 30%. However, in the surrounding countries from the Eurozone, tax rates for similar income brackets tend to be significantly higher.
To be honest, I did like living in Switzerland, but my feeling is that a lot of the benefits they enjoy arise from arbitrage situations with neighboring countries. Taking your example from shopping at Marktkauf [1] (right across the German border in Basel), people living in Switzerland massively go there for multiple reasons:
Similarly, there's a tonne of P.O. box services in the same town allowing you to buy stuff from EU Amazon sites at lower prices and ship it to the P.O. box address in Germany, pick it up and take it over the border.In general, probably Switzerland has opened up in the last few years, but it still feels like a very traditional (even old-fashioned) country deeply rooted in its own ways of doing things, in spite of a very large foreign population, e.g. around 23% of its population (from [2] and [3]) are foreign residents, who live there but have NO right to vote.
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Marktkauf/@47.5901807,7.59...
[2]: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
[3]: http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/01/07/bla...